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THE 



LAND 



OF 



WASHINGTON. 



BOSTON: 

PRESS OF J. W. ROBINSON, 

17S CONGRESS STRKKT, 

1877. 



THE LAND OF THE 



Disinterested Washington. 



A MONOGRAPH 



BY 



CHARLES F. BARNARD. 






THE LAND OF THE 

Disinterested Washington. 



When the Warren Street Chapel was in its prime and I 
was entrusted with its oversight and interests, happening 
to be in New York and hearing that Madam Pfeiffer was 
about to visit our city, I called upon her early the last 
morning of my visit, and tendered her my services during 
her sojourn in Boston. She followed me soon and accepted 
my offer as promptly and frankly as it was made. I was 
with her daily during her stay, carrying her everywhere 
that she cared to go and introducing her to every one of 
my friends who, I felt, cared to see her. Our brother, 
Starr King, was one of these. To my question, in his hear- 
ing, " What have been the best things you have seen in your 
wanderings around the world } " she replied, " Chimborazo, 
for a mountain ; Niagara, for a cataract ; and the dresses 
of the people of the central cities of Asia, for the last." 
"Ah," cried King, familiar with the noble colored print, 
which we owe to Humboldt and Bonpland, of Chimborazo, 
lifting its snowy brow and marble dome above the tawny 
plains beneath the deep blue sky of South America, " I 
mean to see that mountain yet ! " and, when afterwards, 
California became his home, he would doubtless have 
slipped down the coast and admired Chimborazo with all 
our great Austrian sister's zest. " Perhaps," added she, at 
our interview, " what I phced last, should stand first in my 
list. At all events, the beautiful costumes which I saw in 
the ancient and august cities of Upper India come back to 
me oftener and more vividly than all I have ever gazed 



4 THE LAND OF WASHINGTON. 

upon elsewhere. Seldom since I saw them first, when twi- 
light returns, do I fail to close my eyes and recall the hues 
and harmonies of color which are so wonderful, so charm- 
ing, upon the human forms that pass daily and hourly to 
and fro in the crowded streets of old Delhi, Agra, and Be- 
nares. You suppose the show, at first, to come from some 
special pageant or procession, but soon learn with surprise 
and delight that it is only what will greet you whenever 
you and these people meet." 

In the same tone she exclaimed while watching carpets 
woven by machinery and unrolling their patterns, appa- 
rently without man's help, in Lowell : " This is one extreme; 
I saw the other in the East, when women sat down and 
pegging their warp upon the sand and working the wool in 
without pattern or machine to help them, made as fair and 
perfect a web as this of your power loom. Their natural 
taste and skill are all that they need for their task : and so 
common, so habitual, so reliable are these elements with 
them all, that a hundred such women may be weaving a 
hundred palm leaves for the border of an Indian shawl, and 
when the trader buys the leaf which each woman busied 
herself upon alone by herself, apart from all the others and 
without any arrangement or agreement together, all the 
leaves will combine to form a border of lines and colors as 
correct and harmonious as any design or any mechanical 
copy of such a design could secure ! " 

I trace this observation to the same spirit within her, 
which led her to speak of the charming costumes of the 
East. Madam Pfeiffer travelled far and wide, it would seem 
from the tenor of such reports, to study Universal Man — 
the Human Kosmos, if the expression be not too ambi- 
tious. Others travel to explore the Kosmos of Nature, 
she travelled to observe the Kosmos of Mankind. While a 
little child, she had often looked with longing eyes upon 



THE LAND OF WASHINGTON. 5 

every carriage passing her on the road and bearing its 
occupants to scenes and people out of her sight — and, later 
in life, her husband at rest and her children at work, when 
she sillied forth to find her way over land and sea in a 
wider circuit than any one had ever before or since mapped 
out, her favorite paths were those which led to new regions 
and tribes rarely visited by others and little known ere she 
reported them to the world. Remote points and distant 
varieties of the common human family she preferred to 
those that were nearer and more familiar. She loved to 
observe the haunts and the habits of uncivilized, uncontam- 
inated, and unsophisticated — plain and primitive folks — in 
their native wilds and independent existence. "Whenever 
I leave them," cried she, " I miss their simple ways and all 
the charms of their free and fresh, sweet and unconscious 
lives, better to my mind always by far than many of the 
traits of self-styled civilized or even of professedly Christian 
countries and communities. With a single native guide to 
accompany her, she would work her way over vast conti- 
nents or broad seas in pursuit of men under primitive forms 
— far away from all settled life — and when she returned 
and reported herself to our civilization, it was always with 
some new revelation of what is inherent in universal hu- 
manity, some fresh illustration and proof of the Apostle's 
statement, 'God hath made of one blood all men to live on 
all the face of the earth,' and of the words of William Penn, 
the friendly, peaceful settler of the Susquehanna, who 
called the Red Men of the West ' bone of my bone, flesh 
of my flesh,' in acknowledgment of a closer kinship than 
that of brotherhood even. What Madam Pfeiffer saw and 
said, therefore, of the people of the East of our day allied 
them at once with the Egyptians of old and the Moors of 
Spain, remarkable colorists of our race. 

Niagara and Chimborazo she prized highly for their 



6 THE LAND OF WASHINGTON. 

forms and their colors — and to her eye the people of India 
presented the same charms in everything which they wove 
or wore when she was with them. Nor by any means was 
this all that interested and delighted her in them. Their 
welcome always ready for her, their invariable forbearance, 
courtesy, and kindness towards her, their sympathy and 
interest in her, with her's at the same time in them — ren- 
der her reports of the greatet value to every student and 
friend of man. 

Yet no one, perhaps, whose vision had embraced this 
wide and all-commanding field, was surer than herself to 
observe and admire the loftiest together with the lowliest 
traces of what is best in man, image, likeness, manifesta- 
tion of his all-wise and all-gracious original and Maker, as 
she always and everywhere viewed him. 

It was when, also, we went together to Lowell that 
I discovered this : To my remark, " You have not done 
justice to our country," she replied, " No, I have not, I have 
seen indeed very little of the United States. If I live, I 
hope to visit you again and abide longer. But even then, 
how can I do justice to the land of the disinterested Wash- 
ington V 

"You understand that, I see." "Oh, yes — yes," cried 
she, "we feel that all our attempts to change, reform, or 
improve the State are of no avail because we have no dis- 
interested leaders. It is your great good fortune that you 
had in the immortal Washington a disinterested and de- 
voted leader." 

" Contrast him for a moment," she added' "with Napo- 
leon and see what an advantage you possessed at the start 
and have enjoyed ever since. I was but eleven years old 
when Napoleon came to Vienna. It was after he had dis- 
carded Josephine, his loyal, loving wife, and he was about 
to marry a Princess of our Imperial Family. The evening 



THE LAND OF WASHINGTON. 7 

before he entered Vienna, my mother said to me, 'The 
great Napoleon comes to-morrow and you will ^o with me 
to see him.' 'Why, mother,' said I, ' how can you ask me 
to look upon him ? ' Very well, to-morrow we shall see/ 
replied my mother. In the morning she took me with her 
to the gate where he was to enter the city, A barricade 
had been put up to keep the people off of the rcadway. 
We stood together against it. Soon after, a French officer 
dashed by in such array that the crowd, supposing him to 
be Napoleon, waved their hats or handkerchiefs and clapped 
or cheered— I turned my back upon him. My mother, box- 
ing my ears, exclaimed, 'That was not the Emperor, snd 
when he comes I will prevent your turning your back upon 
him.' She then pressed me against the bars and held me 
fast. I submitted in silence, patiently awaiting his approach 
and firmly resolved how to receive him." " And, when he 
came," asked I, " what did you do ? " 

" Do .•• " cried she, " I shut my eyes and would not look 
upon him ! " How little knew he then that one bright-eyed, 
far-seeing little girl of eleven years only had weighed him, 
and finding him wanting in disinterestedness, would not 
allow her eyes to gaze upon him. Long afterwards, from 
his prison at St. Helena, his fall forced him back to the 
child's just scales, and, weighing himself therein at last as 
she did at first, he dated his fall and the decline of " his 
star," as he was wont to call it, to the hour when he entered 
Vienna and one child in the crowd would not see him. The 
incident, as she narrated it, impressed me too forcibly ever 
to be forgotten. I never think of Washington without 
recalling her words, in proot of her consciousness of his dis- 
interestedness, words well worthy of being written, printed 
in a book, graven with an iron pen and laid in the rock for- 
ever. When he, a land surveyor in Western Virginia, was 
once at the Natural Bridge, and, climbing the cliff beneath 



8 THE LAND OP WASHINGTON. 

higher than any one else had ever dared to go, cut his 
name above all others on the stone, the letters were to be- 
come, in time and on the true roll of fame, less lofty and 
long-enduring by far, than our great traveller's expression, 
" The disinterested Was/iingto?i" 

Of course, her comparison of Napoleon with Washington 
did not argue any ignorance of whatever traces of truth, 
goodness or greatness tradition presents or history pre* 
serves to the credit of the former. All she meant — all she 
thought and felt — was this : One was his country's disin- 
terested and devoted servant and leader, the immortal foun- 
der and father of her liberty and her union — the other was 
not. That was enough. She knew, she was sure, it was 
so when she shut her eyes upon Napoleon at the gate of 
Vienna, and when long afterwards she promised herself the 
pleasure of looking again and longer upon the land that 
Washington made free forever through unselfish service in 
her behalf. Alas, her premature death in Madagascar de- 
prived her of a return to our shores. Her impression of 
one whose simple, sincere, and wholly unselfish devotion to 
his country's cause inspired the expression, " The disinter- 
ested Washington." It marked the broad, deep, clear, inef- 
faceable lines that divide him from almost all other leaders 
of their fellows. Nor will her decision, carried with her 
from childhood to death, ever be reversed or questioned by 
any who look upon the wide-spread universal family of man 
with the interest which led her over the whole earth ta 
learn what is common to all varieties of the great whole,, 
what genus cr glimpses of truth, and beauty and goodness^ 
they alike display, and to what heights of heroism they 
sometimes soar in imitation of their Father in Heaven who 
is perfect through his good-will towards all and in ac- 
cordance with his divine example who lived and labored 
and died through a love for man above all selfishness and 



THE LAND OF WASHINGTON. 9 

not afraid even of the shame or the suffering of the cross. 

Madam Pfeiffer was suspected of indifference as to mis- 
sionary movements among the heathen. I asked her if she 
had ever met with missionaries any where, whom she ap- 
proved ? 

" Why, certainly," cried she at once and with emphasis, 
" The Moravian Missions in the Dutch East India posses- 
sions are beyond all praise of mine. Let me describe them 
to you. Young men at home study Theology in the Sem- 
inaries of the United Brethren, as they prefer to call them- 
selves. If the}' propose to enter the Missionary Field, the 
elements of Medicine and Surgery are added to the usual 
Theological or Ministerial course. They all invariably 
learn trades likewise. Instruction and training completed, 
they leave the school, they leave home and native land, 
never to return — their faces and faith fixed forever else- 
where, and all the rest of their days to be devoted to the 
Master's charge and the calls or claims of man, child of 
God with themselves. No matter how remote or uninvit- 
ing the field may be where they find him, there they resolve 
to abide too. 

" Arrived at their selected or appointed posts, they learn 
the language and adopt, as far as is possible or proper, the 
ways of life around them. They marry the native women 
and avoid all the expenses of travel to and fro, change of 
climate or the like for their wives and children. Their 
trades sustain them without any drafts upon their friends 
at home or upon their flocks abroad. Theii- leisure hours 
— evenings and Sundays — they give to the physical, men- 
tal, social, and spiritual benefit of their protegees. They 
work wonders as the healers and helpers, the teachers and 
preachers, the counsellors and consolers, the guides, guar- 
dians, and benefactors of their people. No other mission- 
aries — certainly none of the Protestant church — are to be 



10 THE LAND OF WASHINGTON. 

compared with them. A Latin or a Greek priest, going 
forth with all his goods in his handkerchief and subsisting 
upon the free-will offerings or spontaneous hospitality of 
those he seeks to serve — as I travel among those I desire 
to visit — such a disinterested apostle of the truth and 
goodness of God may do something as well as the Mora- 
vians. Otherwise I never met any missionaries of the cross 
that approach these men in their way of working, their 
spirit throughout it all and the success which attends it." 

I was prepared for her report. These Moravians in 
Greenland, I knew, had wrought the same great and good 
work within its arctic circle. Going there — • where none 
else cared to go — a few years since, they have dotted the 
coast with their schools and chapels. The natives sympa- 
thize with them and second them in all their movements. 
They catch the self-denying tone of the missionaries* lips 
and lives and gladly join in the maintenance of what these 
visitors establish for their good. 

A late traveller reports the Christian settlement thus 
secured upon this apparently unpropitious soil so successful 
that the Greenland converts, not only contribute generously 
in aid of the institutions of learning and religion introduced 
by the Moravians, but gladly also remit ten thousand dollars 
annually to Denmark in acknowledgment of the gift of the 
Gospel, which they owe to that country through these mes- 
sengers of her faith and fellowship. 

Dr. Tuckerman, our pioneer in the Ministry at large, 
was obliged by failing health to pass a winter at Santa 
Cruz, in the West Indies. On his return he reported the 
Moravian Missions of that Danish Island as conducted with 
the same good sense, pervaded with the same good spirit, 
and abounding in the same good fruit that delighted Madam 
Pfeiffer so much in the East Indies, and which others ap- 
prove equally in Greenland. 



THE LAND OF WASHINGTON. 11 

We quote these instances in illustration of her apprecia- 
tion of the highest qualification which Washington pos- 
sessed for the task assigned him in the Providence of God 
and his country's choice. No intelligent student of history, 
no just judge of human character, no one familiar with the 
motives and means, temper, the aims and ends, the mind, 
and heart, and spirit which exalt a man to the highest rank 
of which his nature is capable as the servant and the bene- 
factor of his race, will ever fail to agree with our Austrian 
visitor. In the scales of Heaven the heroic Washington 
and the humble Moravian missionary are of one weight — 
as on the pictured walls of Egyptian catacombs the soul of 
the lordly Pharaoh and the soul of the lowliest slave of his 
dominion must be of like weight — the weight of goodness 
to others — or they could not enter the islands of the blest 
beyond the dark stream of death. 

" Who go to the upper world, the land of perpetual sun- 
shine and Summer .•* " asked Hall of the Esquimaux around 
him, survivors in our land and day of the far-off and old 
Egyptians. 

" They who cared for the' poor," was the reply. 

At another time our brothers of the frozen circle ob- 
served an upturned and smiling look upon the face of Cap- 
tain Hall, who had come to dwell with th^m, learn their 
language, adopt their ways and thus secure their sympa- 
thy and aid in his search for tidings of Sir John Franklin 
and his crew. They crowded around Hall and asked, " why 
that look and that smile .-' " 

" This tells me of the upper world," he replied, pointing 
to the New Testament upon his knee, " and so I lifted up 
my eyes and smiled." " Ah ! " added they, crowding closer 
around him, " O stranger, tell us more of that summer- 
land ! " 

"When," asks he in his Journal, will some young man 



12 THE LAND OF WASHINGTON. 

leave his home and all he loves there behind him and take 
up his abode with this perishing people to tell them of 
Heaven and hereafter, and of what the Father requires of 
us all here ? " 

Russia has ceded their lands to the United States. The 
flag of Washington is theirs now as well as ours. And 
when some one after God's heart and full of the holy spirit 
of disinterested devotion to man's welfare arises, we shall 
have a missionary to give them worthy of the name. 

So Paul was made, by the grace of God, the apostle of 
our Gentile Fathers — sustaining himself by his toil and 
trade and better still by his unselfish, unwearied, and never 
failing love of man, more to be desired, he felt, than tongues 
of men and of angels, gifts of prophecy, understanding and 
knowledge — of more avail than giving all his goods to feed 
the poor or his body to be burned — in one word, greater 
than faith and hope combined. 

Believing Washington's disinterestedness was akin to the 
apostle's, I laid aside my pen to consider what answer 
might be given to some friend's suggestion, We agree with 
you, but why dwell still upon " the old, old story .■* " Before 
grappling with it, a remark reached me and furnished the 
reply. We have an admirable Lyceum in our village, well 
worthy of universal adoption and imitation. I had ventured 
to suggest the character oi Washington as a suitable sub- 
ject for discussion the evening preceding his birthday. 
The Directors, however, decided that the theme had too 
much of a school-boy air ! 

It reminded me of a trifling incident in my experience the 
first time I visited Mount Vernon, nearly forty years ago. 
It was a beautiful summer day and I was sitting upon the 
grass, before the house he built and beneath the trees he 
planted, musing upon The Father of our country. Some 
girls of a profane picnic party, sharing the scene with me. 



THE LAND OF WASHINGTON. 18 

cried with a laugh, "See him kneeling at the Tomb of 
Washington." 

Alas ! for our land if thus in ignorance, indifference or 
infidelity we trifle with his immortal name, hallowed as it is 
the world over to all who revere his sacrifice of himself upon 
the altar of his country and his God. 

A procession that my father carried me to see, sixty 
years ago in my native town, long before it became a city, 
consisted of Boston boys, a little older than myself, march- 
ing through State street, with music and banners, bearing 
on their blue-jacket-breasts Washington's Farewell Address 
in a little red-bound volume, tied with a blue ribbon and 
fluttering its white pages in the breeze, above the white 
pants which completed the lads' costumes. It has haunted 
me ever since and entwined forever in my mind's eye the 
heroic name with the red, white and blue of those boys* 
array. 

Tradition says the Maid of Orleans — early and youthful 
Washington of France — arrayed herself for battle with a 
red mantle over her breast-plate, a white skirt over her 
greaves, a blue bonnet over her helmet — saying, " my own 
red, white and blue — red, for the blood I must shed ; white, 
for the purity I must maintain ; blue, for the heaven I 
seek !" In less than a hundred years after her rallying call 
was raised, France — beautiful and beloved in her eyes — 
reduced to Orleans alone when she left Dowremy, her Lor- 
raine home, to deliver it and crown the careless Charles — in 
less than a hundred years under the inspiration of this dis- 
interested girl, her redeemed land saw every English foe 
driven back to his island home. And we may fondly hope 
that the Republican flag of France will never cease to bear 
the chord of color which the maiden preferred before all 
others. 

The hues and harmonies which Madam Pfeiffer admired 



14 • THE LAND OF WASHINGTON. 

in India, our latest and best writers upon color trace to 
Egypt first, to the Moors next and find now-a-days with 
her in the fabrics and costumes of Delhi, Agra, and Be- 
nares — deep red, clear white, dark blue were the dominant 
tones. 



A word, and I close. After forty-five years in the Min- 
istry at Large, inaugurated in 1822 by Rev. Henry Ware, 
Pastor of the Second Church in Hanover street, after whom 
Dr. Tuckerman labored therein so zealously and devotedly 
from 1826 to 1837, and welcomed me in 1832 as his first 
assistant, charging me to make it the work of my life — 
after forty-five years, I repeat, I seem to have reached a 
point whence the review and report occasionally sent to my 
friends of what I have learned in the study and pursuit of 
my task may not come amiss. 

Should this venture approve itself to those who, shar- 
ing that feeling or fancy only perchance, wish me well and 
would speed me farther on, it will be followed from time to 
time, as opportunities occur, by other papers upon single or 
special subjects — Monographs, as the dictionary defines 
them. My next essay will be upon The City of Channing, 
and appear on or before next April. 

Channing, the eloquent apostle of a liberal, practical, phi- 
lanthropic Faith, inspired me in childhood to dream of all 
that I have ever aimed at or accomplished in man's service 
with God's help in the Ministry so providentially offered 
me at the first. I hope some day to reprint in full his 
charge at my ordination, with Rev. F. T. Gray, in 1834. An 
extract or two must suffice now : — " Speak from your own 
calm convictions, and from nothing else. Distort no truth 
for the sake of effect. No man is fit to preach, who is not 
ready to be a martyr to truth. Fear to stifle any great 



THE LAND OF WASHINGTON. 15 

truth. Look at subjects with your own eyes, utter them in 
your own words. Be yourselves. Be natural. There is 
no other road to the human heart. 

" Be just and generous to your own minds. Cherish every 
divine inspiration. Be no man's slaves. Seek truth for 
yourselves ; speak it from yourselves. Do not dishonor 
your high calling by supposing it to require little force of 
thought or feeling. Find a new tongue ; appeal to the sim- 
ple, universal principles of human nature. You must make 
a new path. Find your way to men's minds and hearts. 
Better forsake your ministry, than make it a monotonous 
repetition of the common modes of teaching and action." 

•* And having done all, stand," adds another apostle. 



This paper is printed chiefly as a private means of com- 
munication between the writer and his friends. To con- 
tinue the series depends entirely upon their sympathy and 
approval. 

The Maid of Orleans' chord of color is taken from her 
Life, by Harriet Parr, a charming work. All else on Color 
is due mainly to The Theory of Color, by Dr. W. Von 
Bezold, translated by S. R. Koehler, with an introduction 
by Prof. Edward C. Pickering, and published by L. Prang 
& Co., Boston, 1876, an invaluable Treatise and Manual. 



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